The blog Legal Project Management, by the Managing Director (Asia) at Global Colleague, cites an article by Sanjay Bandhari, head of e-discovery at Ernst & Young. Bandhari’s article discusses the benefits of applying project management skills to electronic discovery.
The article focuses on four project management (PM) skills, which he refers to as “overarching PM techniques.” I quote them because all projects in legal departments need to attend to these concerns. They are:
- stakeholder management,
- communications management,
- budgetary management, and
- risk management.
For example, if you are head of a project to reduce the number of law firms retained by your legal department, the stakeholders include clients, accounting staff, external counsel and your peers who manage outside counsel. Communications means keeping everyone apprised of how the project is proceeding and what are the issues. Budgetary management means marshalling the people and resources needed for the convergence process and accounting for expenditures. Finally, the project manager needs to attend to risks, which are always part of change management (See my post of Feb. 1, 2009: project teams in law departments with 39 references and 4 metaposts.).